BROWN VS. THE BOARD OF EDUCATION

Today we mark the 40th anniversary of one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions of this century: Brown vs. the Board of Education. This ruling not only put an end to laws that required segregated education, it was a call to arms for the Civil Rights movement. It also set the stage for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Most today would be appalled at laws that mandated children of different races to attend different schools, drink out of different water fountains, swim in different pools. Yet that was the norm in much of the United States before Brown. The court's decision that assigning children to separate schools on the basis of race violated the 14th amendment helped to bring down other equally disgraceful laws in this country.

Still, Brown was not without flaws. By turning the decision in part on sociological theory, the court limited the anti-discrimination principle of the ruling to primary and secondary education. And it helped to usher in an era of anti-constitutional judicial activism, with which we still struggle today.

As George Will wrote on this page Sunday, "The proper, more radical rationale for the Brown outcome was simply that government should not use racial classifications in making decisions. Had the court said that plainly in 1954 -- had the justices been content to apply not sociology but the sweeping legal principle that racial classifications by government inherently violate equal protection -- much subsequent court-produced mischief might have been avoided."

It is easy to look back on the decision and say it should have been better. But the real problems with Brown are not so much it, but what the country, courts and government have done with its legacy. Brown remains today one of the most celebrated judicial decisions in American history, and rightly so.